On the barren, cold expanses of Mars, a discovery has rocked the scientific world. The recent Mars rover unmanned mission has uncovered mud formations that tell tales of wet and dry spells spanning millions of years.
Could this revelation enhance the argument for life having existed on Mars? According to the research paper titled "Sustained wet-dry cycling on early Mars" published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature, the answer looks promising.
At the core of this breakthrough is the discovery of distinctive hexagonal patterns. These shapes, as scientists understand them, emerge when regions experience extended periods of wetness followed by prolonged dryness.
While it's been acknowledged that Mars holds remnants of dried rivers, lakes, and even seas -- a testament to its once wet environment -- the finding that Mars underwent wet-dry cycles multiple times potentially revolutionizes our understanding of the planet's past and its suitability for life.
Related stories: New study sheds light on origins of life on Earth
New discovery substantially rewrites history of life on Earth, scientists find Origins of Life?
Scientists create RNA molecule that follows Darwinian evolution
[Is or was there life on Mars? Of course there was and is, and the U.S. government knows it, and Andrew D. Basiago told us all about it, as did Enterprise Mission Hoagland, and the NASA photos before being smudged, scrubbed, and deleted. The humanoid life is now underground because of the atmosphere, but it is inhabited. And it may also have interdimensional beings, too.]
William Rapin, the lead researcher of the study and a distinguished scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Toulouse, France, commented, “We now have for the first time vestiges of times that could have been conducive to the origin of life.” More: NASA's Curiosity Rover may have found evidence of life on Mars
Alan Watts via KPFK via Agrippa's Diary, Aug. 4, 2023; Eds., Wisdom Quarterly
Alan Watts seems to have accepted his shadow, dark side, and element of irreducible rascality.
Alan Watts on Carl Jung and the Philosophy of Good and Evil
(Agrippa's Diary) In this insightful lecture [in a lisp that is not Watts' natural voice but modified], renowned philosopher Alan Watts delves into an in-depth exploration of world-famous psychologist Carl Jung's groundbreaking theories and his personality.
I'm no fud-dud Ziggy Freud
Watts, known for his deep understanding and eloquence, beautifully unpacks and contemplates the profound perspectives of Jung, the illustrious psychologist and visionary explorer of the human psyche and founder of analytical psychology (Jungian analysis).
His discussion primarily revolves around Jung's fascinating theories of good and evil, shedding new light on their multifaceted implications and enhancing appreciation for Jung's monumental contribution to the
field of psychology
Western spirituality,
the malice inherent in humor,
self-acceptance
the "element of irreducible rascality" as Watts terms it
or in German one's hintaGedanke (hinter thought, an idea in the back of one's mind, the subconscious).
The late Roy of Hollywood Tuckman left us a great legacy, spirituality on Pacifica Radio Los Angeles (kpfk.org) with great overnight programming that includes Thursdays at midnight and Sundays at 8:00 am. Hear Alan Watts and other Buddhist luminaries on Something's Happening.
Jimmy Dore, Kurt Metzger, MikeMacRae.com (jimmydore.com); Eds., Wisdom Quarterly
What is an "Engaged" Buddhist? Is the person about to get married? No, not necessarily. It is someone engaged in the world, aware of politics and the mundane nonsense that governs most of our lives. Protesters, helpers, trust spreaders concerned with saving lives, preserving our rights and health. There is a kind of approach to Buddhism (really, to any spiritual tradition apart from hedonism and maybe Satanism) that is reclusive, withdrawing, inward-turning. That is very important. But the world is still the world, and we are in the world. So it's important to know what's really going on. And more than anyone in the media, it seems Jimmy Dore is the annoying voice speaking truth to power. JP Sears? Redacted Tonight? Russell Brand? Democracy Now!? Joe Rogan? Lots of voices contribute, but Jimmy Dore rises above the rest.
Alan Wilson Watts (Jan. 6, 1915-Nov. 16, 1973) was a British-born American Zen Buddhist philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.
Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a Master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945 then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.
Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA FM, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley.
Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism.
Buddhism: How can you be enlightened?
(Alan Watts) On Buddhism (Theravada and Mahayana) and its central concept of unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) and liberation (nirvana), what is the quest for enlightenment?
In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be, "from a literary point of view -- the best book I have ever written." He also explored human consciousness, in the essay "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book The Joyous Cosmology (1962).
Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. Many of his books are now available in digital format and many of his recorded talks and lectures are available on the Internet. According to the critic Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity."
(IgniteTheMind) Are we all brainwashed? Or have we lost our minds? This journey through the subconscious mind explores the alleged usage of "subliminal messages" in advertising, music, film, television, anti-theft devices, political propaganda, military psychological operations (PsyOps), and advanced weapons. "Programming the Nation" opens Friday.
With their untucked flannel shirts, messy hair, and laid-back air, the three members of [the band] Nirvana -- Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Krist Novoselic -- projected pure slackerdom when they burst onto the cultural scene in 1991. But that look was deceiving. As an expansive new multi-disc re-release of "Nevermind" reveals, the band worked incessantly for more than a year to craft an album that went on to rock the foundation of the music business in the same way that the Sex Pistols' (similarly titled) "Never Mind the Bollocks" caused a punk explosion in the disco age. "These guys were far from slackers; they were very ambitious," says Butch Vig... [Racist] jury convicts Muslims of interrupting Israeli ambassador An Orange County jury has reached a verdict in the Irvine 11 case of Muslim students accused of conspiring and disrupting a February 2010 speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States. The case garnered national attention over free-speech rights and centered on conflicting views of who was being censored.
Nepal to back Palestine's struggle for independence Prime Minister Bhattarai said that Nepal will support Palestine’s bid for statehood if there is voting at the United Nation’s 66th General Assembly. Talking to media in New York, PM Bhattarai said that Nepal would back Palestine’s long struggle for independence.
(ANI) Hindus are concerned at the play "Ganesh Versus the Third Reich," which is having a world premiere at Melbourne Festival in Australia on September 29. Hindu spokesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, said that Lord Ganesh was meant to be worshiped in temples and home shrines and not to be made a laughing stock on theater stages.
Hinduism: Where Science and Spirituality Intersect [Gadadhara Pandit Dasa] was invited to a panel discussion at Columbia Univ. on science and religion. Not having a background in science, I was a bit uncomfortable with participating, but the group organizing the event really wanted an Eastern/Hindu perspective on how science fits into the Hindu philosophy and tradition.
(DNA) Every human on earth seeks happiness. Many devotees perform pujas to prosper and remain happy. But in Hinduism, happiness is something which can be felt after helping others.
Angela Davis is passionate about the hardships of US blacks
Discovered on the floor of a Scandinavian studio, this amazing assemblage of American Black Power voices from 1967-1975 opens in Los Angeles today. Danny Glover on DN!
A Monk’s View: the US and China-Tibet Dialogue (The Tibet Post, Mundgod in Focus: Part II) In a series of special features, TPI journalist Colleen McKown reports from India's largest Tibetan settlement, Mundgod, in the southern state of Karnataka, India. Ven. Tenzin Phenthok is a monk at Drepung Loseling who has lived his whole life in Mundgod. He talked with TPI about his life and dreams, the ways the settlement could develop, and the importance of dialogue between ordinary Tibetans and Chinese.
Buddhist project aims to develop pilgrimage in state PATNA, India - Nava Nalanda Mahavihara (University) in collaboration with the department of youth, art, and culture has initiated a project entitled Revival of the Ancient Buddhist Pilgrimage in Bihar." The project has twin objectives of taking the existing Buddhist pilgrimage [circuit] to other lesser known but important places associated with the Buddha and facilitate community-heritage interface.
Nepal hands over 23 detained Tibetans to UNHCR (VOA Tibet) AUDIO: 23 Tibetan refugees detained... in Nepal for "illegally crossing" into the country have been released Thursday and turned over to the care of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Nepal police arrested 20 Tibetans near a remote western Himalayan village on Sept. 11 for crossing into Nepal from China without having valid travel permits. On Sept. 13, police arrested 3 Tibetans in Barabise of Sindupalchowk district, north-central Nepal.
NEPAL: Gender discrimination fuels malnutrition (IRIN) Malnutrition is chronic in remote areas. Gender discrimination lies behind much of the malnutrition found in under-five children in Nepal, say locals and experts. In Khalanga Bazaar, Jumla District in Nepal's remote mid-west, there is evidence of seasonal plenty -- apples and walnuts in abundance -- yet last month a 3-year-old child died of malnutrition in the neighboring village of Urthu. According to the Nepal Demographic Health Survey (NDHS), 29 percent of children under five are malnourished, and the problem is chronic... (in the NDHS 2006 report) show more than half of the children are chronically malnourished.
Aung San Suu Kyi on Burma’s political changes Rangoon - The opposition leader confirms the beginning of change in the country, but warns that “Change is not always for the better.” For her, the international community must contribute to a solution. The United States is cautiously optimistic about the situation. After many years, some websites are... “It is the beginning of the beginning,” Burmese opposition leader said about her country’s political evolution.... Her words take a bit the sail out of the “winds of change” described by US diplomat Kurt Campbell, who is set to meet Myanmar’s foreign minister shortly.
Burmese stock exchange's long-awaited expansion (Reuters) Federal judge gives shareholders green light for say-on-pay suit. In a quiet room in an aging office block of Myanmar's commercial capital Yangon, a worker scribbles on a whiteboard beneath a row of out-of-sync clocks, updating prices in what could be the world's smallest stock market. Welcome to the Myanmar Securities Exchange (MSEC), among the best-kept secrets of a repressive country hamstrung by Western sanctions and blighted by 49 years of military [dictatorship in the fashion of 1984, the famous Orwell book written about Burma and England].
The general privacy policy published by Guardian News & Media Limited (GNM) applies to content provided by and your use of the Guardian Facebook app (the "App"). Collecting information about you. We collect different types of information about App users for four main reasons:
(Enriquecup, 2011) Dedicated to the Earth, our home in space, NASA's work, and the astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist Carl Sagan. Music by Vangelis.
Helix planetary nebula nicknamed "Eye of God" (NASA)
Buddhist View The Buddhist view of the universe (cosmology) can be found in a Buddhist scripture called the Agganchcha (Pali, Aganna) Sutra. According to Buddhism, as with everything within it, the universe itself is subject to radical imperma-nence. It is in a perpetual state of becoming (rather than "being) and while no discernible beginning is declared, there is also no definitive end. There are instead many beginnings and ends, cyclical ages (aeons) and epochs, and countless other universes (world systems) in all directions.
When the existing universe or world system dies, it goes into a state of undifferentiated chaos. It emerges again due in part to its own nature and partly as a result of karma. At that time, living beings are mostly reborn into a Brahma world (abhassara-brahma-loka). There they subsist on "joy" and fly about.
Billions of years later (immeasurable cycles of time, aeons), an empty space emerges as a result of karma. There a first being, who thus earns the title Maha Brahma (great divinity), is said to be reborn alone. Soon after, other beings (brahmas) are reborn. Often this leads the Great Brahma to imagine that It called them into existence. Later It may say, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first, the last, the always, the creator, the sustainer, the destroyer. As I will it, so it becomes" and other similarly faulty deductions and declarations.
However, the state of Brahmas are only for beings with a store of high caliber karma (merit). Their mental state is such that they are not attached to sensual pleasures. They are neither male nor female but neuter. Other beings, habitually desiring the enjoyment of less refined pleasures, take rebirth in denser worlds.
As a result of their "karma" (those actions previously willed, carried out, and accumulated coming to fruition) appropriate worlds emerge. These worlds are appropriate to the fruition of various actions. This coming into being can take place as the undifferentiated chaos organizes itself into order -- a Big Bang? The universe gradually evolves from entropy into a state where (carbon or physically based) life emerges -- again, largely as a result of karmic-force.
Beings' craving for sensual pleasure forms part of a process known as Dependent Origination (paticca-samuppada). Rebirth takes place based on this principle. Nothing emerges from one thing or cause, but by a confluence of factors. (These are summed up and explained in detail in the Abhidharma or Buddhism's Higher Teachings).
The cycle of Dependent Origination completes itself and repeats until one or more of its factors are weakened and eliminated (e.g., ignorance, craving, etc.). Otherwise, the process cycles and cycles -- marked by impermanently, unsatisfactorily, and (above all) impersonally. The time it takes between the rise and fall of worlds is called a maha kalpa (great age). It is difficult to reckon; therefore, the Buddha described it by way of a staggering analogy. If there were a solid mass of granite a mile high and a mile wide, unbroken, and a tiny bird were to come and whet its beak with a silk cloth only every century...that entire mass of granite would be worn down before a maha kalpa were finished.
Hindu view Science writers Carl Sagan and Fritjof Capra have pointed out similarities between what they consider the latest scientific understanding of the age of the universe and Hinduism's (more technically Brahmanism's) concept of a "day and night of Brahma." This is much closer to the current known age of the universe than other creation myths (when taken literally).
The days and nights of Brahma posit a view of the universe that is divinely created. Like Buddhism and other "Eastern philosophical" view, it is not strictly evolutionary. Instead, it is an ongoing cycle of birth, death, rebirth, and redeath for the universe. According to Sagan:
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still.[Ref]
The Sound of Silence Some Hindus believe that with the pranava mantra -- the AUM sound, or the "Word" in the "Beginning" -- the Universe was started. This is similar to the Big Bang theory. Omkara, the sound of ohm, is posited as the means of creation.
"This idea of a periodically expanding and contracting universe, which involves a scale of time and space of vast proportions, has arisen not only in modern cosmology, but also in ancient Indian mythology. Experiencing the universe as an organic and rhythmically moving cosmos, the Hindus were able to develop evolutionary cosmologies which come very close to our modern scientific models. One of these cosmologies is based on the Hindu myth of lila — the divine play — in which Brahman transforms himself into the world.[Ref]
The Hindu cosmological view of a cyclic universe has received further support from recent activity in loop quantum gravity theories [Bojowald 2007; Corichi and Singh 2008] that postulate that the existing universe is identical in terms of its physical laws to a previously contracting universe across the Big Bang window. Taoist view There may also be a suggestion of a Big Bang to be found in Taoism, a branch of Chinese philosophy. The first verse of the Tao Te Ching ("Book of Changes") is:
"…It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang; the named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind."[Ref]
PHOTOS: 1) Spitzer space telescope, artist conception (NASA); Hammurabi (Indian, Manu) receiving the Code of Laws from Surya, the sun deva (ranajitpal.com); image taken by the Kepler telescope, released by NASA on 4/16/09, shows an expansive, 100-square-degree patch of sky in the Milky Way galaxy where it hopes to find Earth-like planets. (AP/NASA/JPL CalTech); Shiva (the destructive face of Brahman, the godhead (astromandir.com); aum (om) symbol, a letter and sound in the sacred Sanskrit language of the Vedas;
Kepler: New Space Photos PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's new planet-hunting telescope has beamed back the first images of a patch of faraway sky in the Milky Way galaxy where it hopes to find Earth-like planets. NASA on Thursday released several images snapped by Kepler earlier this month, including a view of a distant part of our galaxy containing some 14 million stars. Scientists say more than 100,000 of those stars are potential candidates for research. More>>
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